Aug 14, 2008

Tech - Japan techies eye 'e-skin' for robots

TOKYO: Japanese researchers say they have developed a rubber that is able to conduct electricity well, paving the way for robots with stretchable “e-skin” that can feel heat and pressure like humans.

The material is the first in the world to solve the problems faced by metals—which are conductive but do not stretch—and rubber, which hardly transmits electricity, according to the team at the University of Tokyo.

The new technology is flexible like ordinary rubber but boasts conductivity some 570 times as high as commercially available rubbers filled with carbon particles, said the team led by Takao Someya at the university’s School of Engineering.

If used as wiring, the material can make elastic integrated circuits (ICs), which can be stretched to up to 1.7 times their original size and mounted on curved surfaces with no mechanical damage or major change in conductivity.

One application of the material would be artificial skin on robots, said Tsuyoshi Sekitani, a research associate in the team.

“As robots enter our everyday life, they need to have sensors everywhere on their bodies like humans,” he told said. “Imagine they bump into babies. Robots need to feel temperatures, heat and pressure like we do to co-exist. Otherwise it would be dangerous,” he said.

The material itself can be stretched up to 2.3 times the original size but conductivity drops roughly by half at the maximum extension. It can be stretched by 38 percent with no significant change in conductivity.